My Lords, I was encouraged by my noble friend’s response, and by his batting at the subsequent bowling. It is clear that we are both aiming in the same direction and that, given the expertise of his colleagues and the good will of the Government, we may get somewhere interesting. I would be grateful if he would allow me to come in for a meeting with officials, preferably before the end of January if that is his consultation deadline, to pursue some of the practicalities; a nod will do on these occasions.
We should be more robust in talking to website operators about right of reply. This is merely a question of tweaking a few lines of code. It may be inconvenient for people to do it, but it is essentially practical. It is such a fundamental thing, given the way in which views, opinions and statements travel now that one should be able to attach a reply to it and deal with it robustly in that way. To have a statement with a reply available to people as soon as they pick something up
is a powerful thing in the internet world. That is has not been provided for is merely that it has not been coded. It is essentially not impossible under any circumstances with any website if people put their mind to it. It will not happen immediately, but it should certainly happen within a year if that is a requirement. I would be chary about accepting excuses on that.
There is something to be said for looking at different arrangements for statements about real persons as opposed to statements about businesses. Picking up on the points made correctly and forcefully by my noble friend Lord Faulks, if someone is accused of something which goes to their person, that cannot be allowed to hang around for seven days, or even seven hours, without being dealt with. It should not be within the policies of any reputable web operator that such statements are allowed on their website. These things belong in the hands of the police if there are real accusations. It should not be part of our view of electronic media that it is there to give currency to that sort of statement, whether true or not.
On the other hand, we must be powerful in allowing people to make statements about businesses or the way in which people do business, and to allow website operators to be robust in their defence of people who have made those statements on their websites. As Mumsnet said, the easy answer is to take down. The only way to defeat that easy answer is to make very clear and very practical the responses that are available to the website operator so that they can have certainty in knowing whether a comment is sensible and that the law allows them to stand by it. That is what I want to pursue with the Minister when we have our meeting. On the point about maliciousness, we are talking about a lot of little website operators and not just the big guys, and there are some very malicious ones out there.